Friday 10 March 2000 22.12 EST
First published on Friday 10 March 2000 22.12 EST

Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson 345pp, Doubleday, £16.99

Literary theory, it might fairly be said, is something of a closed book to anyone outside its seething cloisters: a nightmare of lofty pronouncements wagging an excluding finger at those who wouldn't know the difference between langue and parole if it bit them on the bum. Its pompous opacity makes it a nice subject for gentle satire, especially given that its proponents generally operate in the infinitely send-uppable world of academia. Both David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury have made a second, and far more profitable, living out of poking fun at their colleagues' perennial obsession with the difference between reality and make-believe, while firmly holding on to their university posts.

In her third novel, Kate Atkinson has a crack at the none-too-subtle business of metafiction. Emotionally Weird - an unexplained and inexplicably grotty title that suggests a rather different kind of book - is teeming with various fictions; the book itself boasts a bewildering array of typefaces. A more insidious by-product of this carnival of confabulation is that, after a while, the reader has no idea what's true and what isn't. By that point, Atkinson is relying, rather too heavily at times, on the fact that we won't care, so beguiled are we by her narrative exuberance and comic invention.

The thrust of the novel takes place in two main fonts. The first, a no-nonsense sans serif, maroons us on a bleak, wind-lashed island, "a speck of peat and heather pricked with thistles", where Euphemia Stuart-Murray - Effie for short, luckily - and her mother Nora are telling each other stories to while away the austere hours. Effie's story, which takes up by far the bigger portion of the book, focuses on her days as an English student at the University of Dundee in the early 70s, and is thoroughly, deliberately inconsequential. It is almost literally a shaggy dog story - great chunks of it revolve around the proprietorship of a stray canine - its utter unimportance in inverse proportion to its narrator's garrulousness. The novel also exploits the convention that the story less told is the one we want to hear more of, so that while Effie's account of her student days proliferates wildly, her mother's story - concerned with Effie's mysterious parentage - sputters out painfully and haltingly, keeping us, for the most part, in the dark.

Of the other typefaces, a typewriter-style font brings us instalments of student Effie's assignment for her creative-writing course, a seaside thriller; a crazy gothic number signals the Middle Earthish fantasies of one of Effie's classmates; pseudo-handwriting gives away a would-be Mills & Boon romance called The Wards of Love ; and a tellingly hard-to-read face alerts us to The Expanding Prism of J , the magnum opus of Effie's theory-mad tutor.

Everybody in Emotionally Weird is trying to write, and most of them are dreadful at it. For Effie, however, the matter is doubly pressing. In her account of her undergraduate days, life is a fast-enclosing crisis of unmet deadlines, in which she is pursued with dream-like intensity for her detective story, her essay on George Eliot and her dissertation, "Henry James - Man or Maze?". On the island hideout it is her mother who constantly prompts and provokes her to further excesses of storytelling, while simultaneously chiding her for her inability to sustain plot development or character. "It's been nothing but ringing telephones and boiling kettles, doorbells and toilets, since you began," she remarks querulously, but not altogether unjustly.

Much of Atkinson's strength as a writer lies in her talent for observational humour. It's hard not to laugh at her Scottish faculty life 70s-style, which at times combines the savagery of The History Man with the surrealism of A Very Peculiar Practice . Effie's tuned-out boyfriend Bob puzzling over predicate logic while watching Star Trek , a community of hessian-clad hippies trying ineptly to slaughter a goat, a Marxist structuralist lecturer bludgeoning the finer points of Derrida and Barthes into a group of largely unconcerned teenagers - all these are woven into a comic caper with an impressive cast of private dicks, OAPs on the run and precocious children.

Up against this determinedly whimsical competition, Atkinson's second story fares badly, and she never manages to establish the vexed relationship between Nora and Effie, ostensibly the more interesting tale, as a going concern. As for any comment on the nature of what we might call intertextuality, forget it. One suspects Atkinson herself is well aware that she's much better performing a funny turn than telling us anything serious; Emotionally Weird is firmly subtitled "A Comic Novel". Take out the typefaces and banish the overly ponderous outer reaches of this book and it's just a series of gags; but they're pretty good gags, and it's none the worse for that.